About American Samoa

The lodge is located in the beautiful U.S. Territory of American Samoa. American Samoa is located just 14° South of the Equator, and one time zone west of Hawaii, approximately the same distance from Hawaii as Hawaii is from California. A four to five hour flight.

Geographically American Samoa is part of the Samoan Islands Archipelago and constitutes the Eastern half of the island group. Made up of volcanic islands and a few atolls, American Samoa also contains what is considered one of the safest deep draft harbors in the South Pacific. Pago Pago Harbor was a much coveted safe harbor and coaling station during the 19th century as trans-Pacific shipping often needed a safe harbor from frequent tropical storms, resupply, and later on fuel.

American Samoa was admitted into the United States with the signing of the Deeds of Cession (Tutuila Island 1900 and Manu'a Islands 1904), and became a Naval Administered possession until the territory was transferred to the Department of Interior. Since the late 1970s American Samoa has elected their own governor, although a local legislature had been in existence since the late 1960s.

Blogs

Our Establishment, The Turtle & Shark Lodge, has approved the first ever video advertisement on the Malama channel. It will play during the Blue Sky Rugby Sevens coverage at the Veterans' Memorial Stadium today, April 10, 2010.

FEMA is switching from a disaster relief footing to a recovery footing in the coming week. The worst is so far over and people are still a bit twitchy. Yesterday a tsunami warning had most locals heading for the hills, literally. The warning was canceled about 20 minutes before the tsunami was supposed to hit American Samoa.

I have photos of the initial damage from the day of the tsunami on Flickr.

Thanks to all of our friends who stayed with us before who have tried to contact us. I am responding to emails slowly, but for those checking our site, we are okay. No damage to our facility and no one was injured.

Having realized that the Facebook album with photos of the aftermath aren't accessible to non-facebook users, I have decided to create a Flickr page instead of hosting the pictures in one of our own galleries on this site.

From September 1 through October/November the humback whales appear off of our islands' shores. Our Lodge is fortunate to boast a terrific whale watching view as the whales often pass through the waters close to the Lodge. This whaling season, 2009, I will be posting some of the photos I take of the whales as they pass on through.

Well, it was a long time coming. I was updating and working on a new site while reading a book, "Presentation Zen" by Reynolds, Garr. I realized only about 50 pages in that my approach to web design was flawed. While not wrong, my approach wasn't right either. I was designing for search engines and not for the poor users who stumbled across my sites. Presentation Zen would allow me to do both, while not expending all that energy on useless, meaningless content.

The story of Goat Island is an unsettled one. Some people believe that it was named because it was shaped like a goat. This one is easy enough to dispel because an old map of the harbor definitely shows Goat Island, and it wasn't shaped like a goat. Not in the slightest.

The most credible cause for the name was the presence of a "goat" on the island, along with the Officer's Club and so on. Navy personnel that I've spoken to from that time period confirm the presence of a goat. Great, but where did that goat come from?

I spent a great three days covering the PPGFA hosted Steinlager I'a Lapoa' Game Fishing Tournament this past weekend. I was taking pictures for the club as I'm currently working on their web site for them.

Biggest Yellowfin - PPGFA I'a Lapo'a 2008There were a lot of great fish caught during the competition, not the least of which was a tuna that was over 100 lbs. and almost as tall as the angler who caught it.